“You have to have good eyes to see Lincoln in that painting,” offers a middle-aged, bespectacled man standing next to me.
He’s right. Neither he nor I see the 16th president in this Salvador Dali work, a new acquisition in Florida’s Salvador Dali Museum obtained from a private collection and unveiled on March 6.
The immense oil, a 1976 creation, is officially named–take a deep breath–“Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea Which at Twenty Meters Becomes a Portrait of Abraham Lincoln.” It is one of the Spanish surrealist’s trademark trompe l’oeil (French for “trick of the eye” artworks), with a double image. On one hand, viewers see the back of a naked woman, Dali’s wife Gala, peering at the sea and a fiery sky, framed in a mass of solid black and dark blue painted lines. Step backwards and one should see the image of Lincoln as it looks on an American $5 bill.
My neighbor squints, but still no sign of Lincoln. He then tries a new tactic. He takes off his prescription glasses and–what do you know?–there is Lincoln.
He decides to experiment. He offers me his prescription glasses. I put them on and sure enough I now see Lincoln in this optical illusion, sort of like donning cheap, plastic red glasses to read the answer to a trivia question hidden on the back of a baseball card.
The experience is weird. But then again, Salvador Dali was weird. No flowers in vases deck the walls in this art museum; no wave-crested landscapes hang for eternity.
Dali’s Surrealism is not pop art, the stuff that skeptics say anyone could do; you won’t find a painting of a pink dot on a dark blue background. Dali’s work is deep, heady and rife with symbolism.
Take a look at “Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man,” completed in 1943. One’s eyes gravitate to the huge egg in the center of the painting. Decorating the egg are the continents of South America, Africa and Europe. An adult man is struggling to break out, like a sparrow being born, from the spot where North America should be. Look to the egg’s right side and one sees a scrawny, elderly, androgynous figure pointing toward the egg, with a fearful child grasping its legs.
The egg is the world. The man is emerging from the United States, on the verge of becoming a world power and the Spanish-born artist’s home at the time. The man’s left hand is grasping Europe, crushing the once powerful continent that in 1943 was under the thumb of Nazism. South America and Africa are oversized, perhaps stressing the burgeoning growth of the Third World. The figure is indicating the importance of the new world power, and the child represents its spirit.
Take a glance at the lower edge of the painting. The shadow cast by the child is perhaps three times longer than that of the adult figure; the child, the new world power, will some day supplant the old order.
As for the artist, he always knew he was talented–and intelligent. As a young man he was booted out of art school for telling the faculty he knew more about his artistic hero, Raphael, than all the teachers put together. He was also skilled in another art–self-promotion. He grew a loopy mustache to draw attention to himself and he made outlandish statements, such as, “I started calling myself a genius to impress people, and ended up being one.”
Born in Spain, in the Catalonia area in 1904, Dali’s artistic reputation solidified in his country after his first one-man show in Barcelona in 1925. He became a respected name in the international art world after three of his paintings were exhibited at the Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh in 1928. One of that trio, a still life titled “Basket of Bread,” hangs here in St. Petersburg. It is reminiscent of 17th Century Dutch paintings, particularly those of Jan Vermeer.
Bread is a recurring theme in Dali’s work. It represents many things: a staple of life in Spain, a sexual symbol and the eucharist. Ever the self-promoter, Dali once had a four-meter-long (a bit over 13 feet) loaf of bread baked especially for him.
A not-so-recurring theme is the melting watch, even though that may be the most common image associated with Dali. His most famous work, “Persistence of Memory,” painted in 1931 with drooping watches stretched across a barren landscape, is not here. It hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
What is here in St. Petersburg is a kind of sequel: “Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory” (1952-1954). It is more or less a, well , . . . disintegration of the former work, with its elements shattered by the aftereffects of an atomic bomb. The soft watch that was draped over a branch of a dead olive tree in the earlier painting is ripping apart.
At any given time somewhere between 40 and 60 of the 96 oil paintings in the museum’s collection are displayed. An abundant selection of the more than 2,000 graphics, drawings and watercolors are exhibited as well. Not all is surreal, especially Dali’s earliest works. His surprising experimentation with cubism is evidenced by his 1924 work “Sandia.” In his 1921 self-portrait, Dali, sans mustache, depicts himself as a foppish sort of guy smoking a pipe and donning a red scarf, black cape and a broad brimmed hat a toddler could swim in.
He also had parental issues. Dali’s father, a bureaucrat also named Salvador Dali, threw his son out of the family home after learning he was seeing Gala, who at the time was another man’s wife. Dali’s painting “The Average Bureaucrat” (1930) depicts the title figure as an empty shell of a man with holes in his head where brain matter should be. He has no ears; Dali felt bureaucrats did not listen to people. Yet Dali displays a longing for the father he once respected, evidenced by the tiny images of a father and son walking hand in hand to the left of the bureaucrat’s bowed head.
The majority of the museum holdings came from the private collection of Cleveland plastics entrepreneur and Dali friend A. Reynolds Morse and his wife, Eleanor. The Morses first opened their collection to the public in a small Cleveland-based museum in 1971, but it soon outgrew its home. A group of St. Petersburg-area business leaders heard that a home was needed for the Morse-owned Dalis, and with the Florida tourist trade in mind, the Morses agreed to allow their collection to move south. The museum opened here in a waterfront location in 1982.
However, this museum has become too small for the collection. Staff member Kathy White says more classroom space, as well as more wall space for temporary exhibits, is needed, and a new structure is planned. In addition, the new building will be more hurricane-resistant. During the frantic hurricane season of 2004, the displayed paintings twice had to be removed from the walls and into a vault in the space of a few months. The exhibit space of the new building, less than a mile away and about eight blocks closer to downtown, will be above flood level. The target date for the new museum building is early 2008.
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IF YOU GO
GETTING THERE
The Salvador Dali Museum is at 1000 3rd St. S. in St. Petersburg; 800-442-3254 or 727-823-3767; www.salvadordalimuseum.org.
The museum is open daily except Thanksgiving and Christmas; hours are 9:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Monday-Wednesday and Friday-Saturday, 9:30 a.m.-8 p.m. Thursday and noon-5:30 p.m. Sunday. Admission: $14 adults; $12 ages 65 and over and police, fire and military personnel; $9 ages 10-17 and 18 and up with student ID; $3.50 ages 5-9.
Museum attendees will get much more out of their visits by taking the free, hour-long guided tours offered daily, usually starting on the hour, but the schedule is inconsistent, so call in advance if you have your heart set on a certain time.
The next temporary exhibit, “Pollock to Pop: America’s Brush With Dali,” showcasing the works of key American pop and abstract artists juxtaposed with Dali’s art, will be up from Dec. 9 through April 23, 2006.
— M.S.
